Furniture Consignment Gallery Blog

"Oh, no!" One of our best customers, an interior designer, was in mid-conversation with a staffer when she caught sight of a new sectional across the showroom. "Impossible!" she exclaimed, striding over to examine the piece. "I simply don't believe it."   

Turns out, she had a history with this particular piece of furniture. Six months ago, she had been working for a couple that had been - hmmm, how to put this nicely? - very challenging clients. They bickered so much during the design process that she felt like more of a referee than a designer.

What really broke her spirit, she confessed, was selecting their sectional. Last winter, the trio trekked through the snow to all the furniture showrooms in and around Boston. Every couch she suggested they dismissed as too soft, too firm, too stiff, or too sloppy.

Eventually, they agreed on a style. That's when picking the fabric became the new nightmare. They spent endless hours poring over swatches. Finally, the couple settled on a custom tight-back sectional with a chaise and the designer placed the order.  

Sixteen weeks later, and a dozen or more anxious client phone calls to the designer, the sectional was delivered. The couple had a rare moment of miserable agreement - they just didn't like it. Without telling their designer, they shipped it off quietly to FCG.

So here it was sitting in our showroom. The sectional was spotless, stylish, and well crafted with vivid colors.  Its price tag was a fraction of what the couple had paid only a few weeks earlier. The designer ran her hand over the fabric. "What a waste," she said sadly.  

Shortly after she left, a family of six wandered in. Catching sight of the sectional, the teens raced across the showroom and leaped on it joyfully. "Can we get it?" they begged their parents. "It's awesome!"

I wish the dejected designer had stayed long enough to see how much this family loved the sectional. All her work and talent were finally being appreciated. I thought it was proof of the old adage: beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Happy people can find it pretty much anywhere.

Eleanor Roosevelt once declared Main Street in Hingham to be the loveliest street in America. Now, I don't want to detonate a firestorm of civic pride here. Wellesley, Weston, Salem and Gloucester, I'll concede you've got your charms. But I beg to disagree with the First Lady. My vote goes to Concord.

Rich in political and literary history, Concord is a quintessential New England village, serene and timeless. Louisa May Alcott wrote "Little Women" here. Thoreau fled to its woods to chop wood and pen his famous epistle, "Walden." The town is graced with proud homes, elegant gardens, lush lawns, simple churches, cozy taverns and dark ponds.  

That is why I was so excited last week visiting a beautiful historic home in the center of town. Built in1884, this three-story 7,000-square-foot brick home has four chimneys and a barn out back. Originally built as a summer home for his family by a wealthy merchant in Boston, the house has been lovingly preserved and renovated many times in the last century. Its current owner is selling the house - and has offered its furniture to FCG. 

Our moving crew worked tirelessly, filling our truck with custom furniture designed just for this extraordinary home. The list of items is long: gold damask sofas by Baker, occasional chairs by Lillian August, a pristine mahogany dining set by Kindle, a drop-leaf table in gleaming bird's eye maple, leather chairs and sofas.

Concord's favorite son Thoreau urged us to seize the day, breathe the spring air, taste the new fruit - and, he would have added, appreciate the workmanship of our nation's top craftsmen. Our Hanover store is chockfull of amazing furniture pieces from this grand home. Come in and take a look. I promise you'll be as thrilled as I am.

"Hey, Jay!" one of the other dads hollered at me from the other side of the ballpark as our sons were finishing up soccer practice. "Looking forward to the party!" I nodded, grinned and waved back at the guy trying not to look totally confused. "Party?" I thought. "What party?"   

Ten minutes later, I found out. Parked in my driveway was a truck. Two men were hauling a massive inflatable bouncing house into my backyard. Yes, we apparently were having a party. Robbie, our youngest, was turning seven. His buddies were coming to our house to celebrate. All of them.

Inviting 20 seven-year-old boys to a backyard birthday party is sheer lunacy. There are no carrot sticks on the menu, just pure sugar bombs. Add an arsenal of plastic weaponry and you've got an incendiary mix. You'd have less damage from a horde of Mongols.

Other parents - that is, the ones who value their homes - outsource these kinds of events. They rent an indestructible party palace for the afternoon. That's so the joint can be hosed down and, if necessary, rebuilt after the party. 

Whose idea was this wingding anyway? Diana, my wife, looked remarkably cheerful for someone about to be overrun by munchkins with inflatable pickaxes. "Jay," she insisted. "It'll be fun!"  

What actually happened was two hours of utter mayhem.  Like an invading force of troop carriers, SUVs pulled up in front of our house at precisely 4 p.m. Out spilled an army of howling kids. The party instantly devolved into a battle scene. Their parents stood at the perimeter - wine and beer in hand - watching in shock.

Robbie's older brother, Cade, had been enlisted as a kind of bouncer to keep the peace. At 15, he is six feet tall and 190 pounds, but he was no match for a swarm of seven-year-olds. They attacked and beat him into submission with their axes. I could hear muffled cries for help, but I wasn't about to risk the fury of the mob.

Considering the battlefield wounds, we probably should have had a MASH Unit. One boy ran up to his mom with blood running down his lip. "Mom," he said breathlessly. "Can you hold my tooth?" He dropped the tiny pearl into her hand and raced back into action.

Harrodsburg, Kentucky is a sleepy town of about 9,000, except for certain times of year when the place is seized with a peculiar sports mania. That would be the winter college basketball season and the eve of the Kentucky Derby.

Some of the best gossip in town could be gotten at the Davis Beauty Shop. Martha Davis, the owner, was married to the basketball coach of Harrodsburg High School in Mercer County. He had a hotline to Coach Adolf Rupp of the University of Kentucky, one of the most successful coaches in the history of American college basketball.

So the women of the bluegrass would make their weekly pilgrimages to see Martha - with the full encouragement of their husbands. That's because the women would come home not only freshly coiffed but also fully stocked with hot tips for their husbands on horses and basketball.    

Now 95, Martha hasn't wielded a curling iron for a while now but she's still as elegant and indomitable as she was in her prime. Last year, she downsized and sold the classic belle of a mansion she and her husband, Coach Davis, had owned on Harrodsburg's Main Street.

Diana, my wife, was fortunate to get some of the beautiful furniture that graced her grandmother's home. So was Furniture Consignment Gallery. Martha entrusted us to sell some of her favorite pieces, among them an Empire chest and an antique pine rope bed.     

Even on a big boat, space is tight. That makes furnishing the place a challenge, especially when you make the boat your full-time home. In fact, it is probably every bit as frustrating a puzzle as a Rubik's Cube.

Which explains the email I got earlier this week from a customer, whom I'll call the Captain. "Greetings, Jay," he wrote. "Get out your tape measure. Prepare to be ACCURATE - to the eighth of an inch or better. These measurements are crucial and will require eyeballs at floor level."

Apparently, the Captain had fallen in love with a beautiful walnut chest of drawers he'd found on our website He wanted to install it in his bedroom on the boat. The problem? The dresser was 25 inches wide - two inches wider than the aft door.

Living at sea, the Captain apparently has acquired a necessary ingenuity. "What is the height of the legs under the chest?" the Captain asked in his email. Perhaps, he mused, he could turn the dresser on its side and spiral it around the door frame. The legs, he warned, would have to be at least 2¼ inches high to accomplish this feat.

Even by email, the Captain was a commanding presence. "Jay," he wrote, "remove the upper-most drawers from the dresser. Look inside and determine how the top of the dresser is attached. Is it by glue or by screw? I may be able to remove the top. Hence, it will easily clear the narrow door frame."

The Captain is one of my favorite customers even if he does make me feel like a bit of a swabbie. He loves fine furniture - and he really likes the bargains he finds at Furniture Consignment Gallery. He also knows he can rely on our associates to get down on the floor and get those measurements quickly and accurately - down to the sixteenth of an inch.

He's been shopping our website for years and we've had the honor of furnishing his sixty-foot, thirty-ton boat, which is moored in a slip in Los Angeles. Every couple of months, he finds a piece he loves and after has it shipped three thousand miles to the marina he calls home.

I'd like to meet the guy one of these days. I'd like a tour of his boat. Most of all, I'd like to find out how he managed to get a 25-inch wide dresser through a 23-inch wide door.

Mysteriously, a giant pine tree fell in our yard last weekend, crushing sections of a new fence we'd installed only a year ago. We didn't hear or see anything in the night, but the backyard was a mess when we awoke on Easter Sunday.

So after church, instead of our traditional egg hunt, we got to work. Our three boys swung axes. I manned the chain saw. We cut the tree into pieces and hauled it away.

Winters are notoriously tough in New England, but spring with its driving rains and high winds can be just as hard. Mother Nature or some other malevolent force seems to take pleasure in unleashing a legion of gremlins just to test our capacity for misery.

It was a week of woe. After the tree episode, our icemaker went on strike. It was new. Thanks a lot, GE. You've ruined my much-anticipated end-of-week treat: bourbon over ice on a Friday night.

Next, our cable router died, leaving us without Internet - for three days. Ouch! The demons even followed me to work. Our trucks had so many ailments they needed a full-time mechanic.

Things break. That's just the way it goes. But I'm old enough now to realize that new things seem to break more often - and more completely - than the old ones. And most of the new things are made so shoddily they aren't worth repairing.

So beware when you hear about new furniture deals that seem too good to be true. Retailers are offering aggressive promotions this spring on furniture. Samples: "Only $5 a day" or "We'll pay your sales tax" or "If the Red Sox win the pennant, your furniture is free!"

Here's the reality. That furniture might not last any longer than the installment payments you'll be making. You'll get far better quality buying the consignment furniture in our showrooms.  

Even the quality pre-owned furniture that you buy from us today could be sold again tomorow. We have a nice Pompanoosuc Mills dining room set scheduled to arrive today that was bought from us five years ago.  Quality furniture will have resale value as long as the style stays in play. 

Feel free to disregard my advice. But I'll be happy to lend you a couple of axes and my chainsaw in a couple of years when you're hauling the cheap stuff off to the dump. 

As the massive glacier of snow and ice recedes from our lawn, a new treasure appears every day. Surprise! Here's a single ice skate that's been missing for months. Yesterday, I found the football the boys got for Christmas, along with a partially chewed pizza box, sans pizza. Roxie, our toddler boxer, is the culprit. She considers everything in our house - and our garbage - to be her personal chew toy. Our front lawn is a graveyard of well-masticated items lying, like bleached bones, in full view of the neighborhood.

Thanks to Mother Nature, we had no idea the full extent of our pup's destructive instincts. Snow after snow hid the evidence. Now, we're placing bets on what might appear next during the Big Melt. I am missing my grill light er. But it's not like I need it yet. I still can't find my grill under the avalanche of snow that slid off the roof.

We aren't the only ones cleaning up a lot of debris after a harsh winter. One of our neighbors in town discovered a deer carcass in a snow bank. At least we haven't had to bury anything at our house.

At work, though, I've been tempted to get out the shovel this week. We've been witnessing a curious phenomenon in our showrooms. Suddenly, people are trying to pawn off on us the stuff they've unearthed this spring from their cellars, attics or, in some cases it seems, their snow banks.

We're talking faded pastel art prints from the 1970s, smelly rugs, and a couple of upholstered chairs that look like they'd served as cat scratching posts for a couple of decades. We had about ten cars show up yesterday full with crapola. Thanks for thinking of us, but no.

Boston is finally emerging from hibernation after a brutally harsh winter. And it isn't a pretty sight out there. So if you're looking for a place to unload the flotsam and jetsam at your home, make a beeline - for the dump. We only take the best of the best at FCG.

Our newest feature "Consignor Log-in" is exciting to us because it will allow us to give our customers and consignors the opportunity to view their consigned items and previous in-store purchases in real-time on the internet and the App. Here are instructions on how to get started!

How to Get Started

Step 1.
The first step is making sure you're in our system with the correct email, if at all. To update this information you can either call one of our 3 stores, do it in person in one of our three stores or fill out the form at the bottom of this page to be updated. Filling out the form will put your information in our digital que to be placed in by one of our staff. Please allow 24-48 hrs if you choose to do it this way.

Step 2.
Once you are entered into our system here you will receive an email like this:

Once you have received this email above it means one of our staff members have manually entered you into our system by updating your account with us. This email can take a couple hours to arrive after we have entered you depending on your device, email service or wifi speed. Please note that depending on your email provider this email may go to your SPAM folder. If you can't find it, go to your SPAM and look for "Consignor Login Information"

Step 3.
Go to our Front Page and click the "Consignor Log-in" button

Step 4.
After reading this entire page you can click on this button:

Step 5.

This will take you to our log-in page. The design may be updated in the future, but for the moment this is what it looks like. Enter your entire email in BOTH fields, Username and password. Do NOT use captial letters of any kind. Email address are not captial letter sensitive but username and passwords boxes ARE so if it doesn't match our system it won't work.

Step 6.
After you enter this the first time it will trigger another email for you to go find in your inbox that will look like this:

Click through that link to change your password. This password IS case sensitive. Make sure you make it something you will remember. We suggest at least one capital letter and one number.

Step 6.

Using your FULL email address as your Username and the new password you have just created, you will log-in to the system and be brought to this page:

That's how you log-in to Consignor Log-in for the first time! There will be another blog post about all the features and what they mean soon. I will link that here when I'm finished!

"Are you saying, sir, the name of your company is Furniture Consignment Gallery?" the customer service rep asked for the third time. "How do you spell 'furniture'?"

"How do you spell 'furniture'?" I snapped in irritation. "Well, it begins with an "f" - as in frustrated!"

Few things try my patience more than calling a customer service hotline. Yesterday, I spent twenty minutes on the phone trying to cancel a newspaper subscription. The hapless rep couldn't spell "Furniture." "Consignment"? Too much of a challenge.

She put me on hold to find "someone who could better assist me. " In her call center, that might take an eternity. Even more aggravating was the email from her company that popped into my mailbox a few hours later: "How was your customer experience? Please take our brief survey!"

These days, it seems like everyone in business is conducting a survey about the "customer experience." I got the oil changed in my car, and two hours later got an email asking me to take a survey. I got my teeth cleaned. My dentist asked me to fill out a survey.

My answer to all of them is "no."

My needs are pretty simple. I want to cancel my subscription quickly and efficiently. I want my oil changed by a trustworthy mechanic. I want the dentist to clean my teeth with no additional fuss. And then I want to be left alone.

So, companies, big and small, here's my advice. Forget the surveys. Provide your customers with good service from the moment they walk in the door or call on the phone. You don't need a survey to tell you when you're doing a good job. Your customers leave happy. They come back again. They also send friends and family your way.

That is what we strive to do every day at Furniture Consignment Gallery. You get a real staffer on the phone when you call FCG. We'll answer your questions honestly. We deliver your furniture on time. And you'll never get an email from us asking you to rate you to rate the displays in our showrooms. The "F" in FCG stands for quality furniture - not frustration.

Wafting out the window was an irresistible smell: cookies. Italian cookies, loaded with butter and spice, to be more specific. Inside, a white-haired older woman was busy trying out the oven in her new condo. She smiled and beckoned us into the kitchen. Trays of cookies were cooling on the countertop.

"Oh, boy!" I thought. "Smells just like my grandmother's house ..."

We were there to deliver some furniture she'd bought for her condo in a new retirement community. Up and down the stairs we jogged for almost an hour carrying dressers, bedside tables, chairs - and drooling over the still-warm cookies. When we were finished, she thanked us cheerily and shooed us out the door - without dishing out so much as a single cookie.

"Humph," I found myself stewing darkly in the truck all the way back to the store. "No cookies? No cookies! My grandmother wouldn't let you leave her house without eating two big meals and carrying home a week's worth of food. That woman might have had the recipes, but I bet she wasn't even Italian."

Yes, life is much easier if you can manage to roll along without expectations. On the other hand, life also serves up some unanticipated pleasures when they are least expected.

Monday was a quiet day in the showroom. Most moms were shopping the back-to-school specials, not looking for furniture. I was busy doing paperwork. A long-time customer popped in on her way to visit a friend down the street. She had just baked several dozen cookies, forgetting that her friend was gone on vacation for the week.

"Please take them," she pleaded pushing a fragrant tray of just-baked cookies across the counter at me." I just made them - and I can't eat them all."

They were frosted - and Italian - the best I've had since I lost my grandmother a decade ago. Thanks to that oven-mitt-wearing angel, I was reminded once again that life is unpredictable - and that you've got to embrace the disappointments along with the joys.

That's sort of what it is like to visit our furniture showrooms. You may not always find everything that's on your list. But sometimes, when you least expect it, you'll find a treasure you couldn't have imagined.